Categories

Static Methods and Properties In PHP

In my last tutorial, What Object-Oriented Programming Is NOT, I mentioned that over-using or mis-using the static keyword is one way developers get confused with object-oriented programming. That, often, they simply take their procedural code, dump into a class, make everything static and away we go.

The format_date() method is one that could be used in various places throughout your application and wouldn’t need constantly re-instantiated to use. And, of course, this Library class could contain various, similar methods that have data-agnostic uses. A kind of “catch-all” for miscellaneous functions.

And, of course, as you’ve seen the way to make a property or method static is to simply add the “static” keyword to the declaration, like so:

One Comment on “Static Methods and Properties In PHP”

Douglas Heller

January 3, 2018 at 9:26 pm

Hey John. Enjoyed this. In some of the other programming languages I’ve studied I’ve used static properties/methods in classes which would be routinely accessed in various parts of the application. An example would be CDatabaseUtilities in which the database connection object and all other database functions would be defined. Another would be a CUtilities class in which various form validation methods and other general, commonly used utilities can be defined. In doing so you cut down on redundant coding as well as provide more modularization. Many of these methods are easily transported to other applications as well. I’ll be looking forward to doing something similar once I get to work on your OOP course which I’m hoping will be within the next week. Many thanks.